‘Orphan Black’ Recap 2×7: Tooth and Consequences

Well, the question of who is really in charge at the Dyad Institute just got resolved for us. Turns out it was new guest star Michelle Forbes all along—which makes sense. Even though this is the first time she’s shown her face, we all just should have guessed it would turn out to be Michelle Forbes. She’s basically become the universal science fiction signifier for HBIC.

Why is it that some actors from sci-fi and fantasy shows get so associated with the genre that casting directors just love to throw them into their new sci-fi series? Ben Browder, for instance. Or Lexa Doig. Or Summer Glau. Is it just a way of giving a nod to the geeks in the audience, so they can say, “Wow, look, Ensign Ro/Admiral Cain (depending on how old said geek is) showed up on Orphan Black! So cool!”? Or maybe these actors are just really good at saying sci-fi dialogue—which, let’s face it, is often pretty ridiculous as written—so it sounds good and meaningful.

In any case, all Ro/Cain really does in this episode is learn that Doctor Duncan is still alive, vaguely threaten Doctor Leekie about it, and then make good on that threat by ordering Rachel to kill him. This chain of events is set in motion by the subtle stratagems of Siobhan Sadler, who uses what Duncan has given her—knowledge of the fact that Leekie killed Rachel’s mother, plus floppy disks (remember those?!) with the forgotten secrets to cloning on them—to play Rachel and Leekie off each other. Whether Rachel has come around to their side has yet to be seen, but at least Leekie and his dark, devious schemes has been taken off the playing field.

Rachel proves that she does actually have some feelings after all, and they’re conflicted ones. She wants revenge on her mother’s killer enough to call in the hit on Leekie, but she also has enough pity on the man who raised her to allow him a head start. And he would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for that pesky Donnie.

Poor, poor idiotic Donnie. And though I never thought I’d say this: Poor, poor idiotic Victor, too. The male characters on this show just never have a very good time of it, do they?

Family Day at the rehab center certainly didn’t promise to be a pleasant chore (Felix calls it a “public flagellation”), but this was really quite the no good, very bad day for everyone involved. Alison confesses to Felix that she killed Ainsley—and Michael Mando’s eyes do this wonderful thing, managing to convey that Felix is both dumbfounded by the confession and overjoyed that he now has some real dirt to tell Detective Angela “Angel of the Angels” Deangelis and get his record cleared.

But Ali overhears him setting up their meet. (Because for some reason Vic doesn’t even close his door when conveying this sensitive information. At least he has the excuse of being dumb as a rock. Delphine, on the other hand, who basically does the exact same thing three scenes later, is supposed to be a genius, so who the hell knows.) And she goes into full-blown paranoid mode—for good reason, for once—and calls Felix.

Vic promises to lie to Angie if he gets to deliver his ninth-step amends to Sarah in person. So they pull her away from her reunion with Kira and Cal—who is just starting to understand how deep the rabbit hole goes, now that Dyad is spying on him through his webcam—to join in on the Family Day celebrations.

Of course thus is Vic, and he’s a shift mofo, and also still in love with Sarah, so things get volatile very quickly. I’m not clear on precisely when Felix decided to slip him a mickey, but it seems he could have saved Sarah a trip if this was the plan all along? Not to mention avoiding all of the madcap (and ultimately fatal) confusion that ensues.

Namely: Felix and Ali cart Vic’s body off to make it look like he just fell off the wagon and into a table full of glitter glue and marabou feathers. Leaving Sarah behind to be mistaken for Ali by rehab staff, and forced to participate in a public role-playing exercise with Donnie. And here Orphan Black starts winking at us so hard I wouldn’t be surprised if it pulled a muscle in its eyelid. Instead of just having one clone pretending to be another, now we have one pretending to be another who is pretending to be her husband, while her husband pretends to be her. In front of an audience. Sarah is clever, but not quite clever enough for this brain-buster. Her accent slips, then she overcorrects it, then forgets how the game works, and finally just gives up and claims she has to “tinkle.” (Which is itself sort of a genius recovery, because that’s exactly how Alison would have put it.)

Chasing her to her room, Donnie is suddenly confronted with two identical versions of his wife—and now it is his brain’s turn to break a little. Oops, Donnie didn’t know anything about clones. He just thought he was helping with some sort of double-blind sociology experiment. In other words, Alison spells it out for him, he betrayed her trust and ruined their marriage for a cause he knew nothing about. A cause—she twists the knife—that he’s too stupid to understand.

Well, that was all the push he needed. Donnie goes to confront Dr. Leekie—who makes it clear has no patience or time for this crap right now, being on the run from Michelle Forbes and all—and his gun goes off accidentally, making an unfortunate pun of the good doctor’s name all over the passenger-side window of his car. And sending us into one of the more ironic uses of the Troggs’ “Love Is All Around” in recent memory, and the closing credits.

Meanwhile, Delphine and Cosima continue to be boring. I guess it’s sort of fun that they manage to make an intrauterine surgical procedure somehow erotic. But then Cos finds out that the stem cells they’re using to treat her came from Kira’s baby tooth. So not only did Delphine lie to her, but they’re going to run out of magic cure soon. And when Kira (continuing to be both super-sweet and so, so spooky) selflessly pulls out another of her teeth to save her Auntie Cosima, Sarah decides, over Cal’s wan protest, that it’s finally time to bring the kid in.

After diving off into their own plotlines for most of the season, the clones’ lives are starting to draw closer together once again, with Sarah, as always, playing the go-between. Even Rachel seems to be coming into the fold in some sense. Well, reunions are always nice, but when these sisters meet, there is always collateral damage (“like two colliding trainwrecks,” Sarah tells Vic). And we have yet to see how Helena and her Prolethean Franken-fetus are going fit into it all.